A couple of things happened recently that made us look again at what we do and how we do it. It is after all always good to go back to the fundamentals occasionally to make sure your still on the right track.
The first was a long and rambling whinge from a winter dining customer, one of a group who were from the hospitality industry. When distilled down it seemed to be a complaint that we didn’t have enough bling and excess in our décor and service. My rather condescending response was not to address the detail but to explain how we apply the concept of lagom to our operations.
Since we started the Snark project, we had one fundamental principle which is embodied in the ship's name and which we have written about before. ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ is a poem by Lewis Carroll about a group of men from diverse backgrounds setting off in pursuit of a mythical beast. They don’t know what t looks like or how it will behave. As they search each has an epiphany of self understanding, and eventually one finds the beast (maybe) and disappears laughing.
In later life Carroll agreed that for him the poem was an allegory for the pursuit of happiness. But this was not the happiness of contemporary hedonism, rather the happiness of Epidaurus the Greek philosopher. In his world view happiness could be achieved through the absence of fear and the absence of want. He espoused a simple life, where the society of friends is more important than the pursuit of pleasure and excess. This is the happiness embodies in much subsequent philosophical thinking from the Enlightenment to the American declaration, and now often identified with the Scandinavian world view of lagom (the Swedish word loosely meaning sufficient, the correct way etc. the Norwegians, Finns and Danes have different but parallel words.)
I recently read an anecdote online (so it is obviously true!) about Joseph Heller attending a party on a billionaire’s private island. Another guest says to him ‘You know ***** makes more money in a day that you have ever received from Catch 22 in a lifetime.’ Heller replied, ‘Yes but I have something he will never have; enough.’ In respect of our customer we thought, Did they have enough to eat? Yes, indeed some food came back to the kitchen. Did they enjoy the food? Yes, two of the group complimented us on the day on the quality of the cooking; Was the service prompt and friendly? Yes. I could go on. So, what was their problem, well simply they wanted more that we offered. I strongly suspect that even if we had given them the extra bling then there would have been something else that was missing. As Heller pointed out some people can never have ‘enough’
The other fundamental principle we endeavour to maintain, is to run the business as sustainably as possible. The second ‘thing’ was three days spent filling in an application for a decarbonisation grant for solar panels and additional battery storage on Snark. This involved answering endless questions about how the grant would benefit the community and other businesses, the long term benefits etc. To give convincing arguments we looked again at our carbon emissions and how they could be reduced. The shocking conclusion, not highlighted in the application, was that the saving in CO2 emissions we could generate over ten years was no more than the output of one jumbo jet taking off from an airport!
This is one way we can both contribute to the mitigation of the current environmental emergency and also to offer an example of how it can be done. Fitting solar panels has been in our plan for years but never gets to the top of the priority list. If three days down the grant application rabbit hole gets us closer to our aim then that is time well spent. It’s true the real contribution we make is infinitesimal in the greater picture. The decision of a few hundred people to take a fight somewhere completely wipes out the reduction we can make over the lifetime of our business.
So why bother? This is the argument that at a micro or macro scale have been promulgated for decades by those with a vested interest to prevent positive climate action.
o ‘If China is still building coal fired power stations, why should we do anything’.
o ‘It will only hurt our economy and make us less competitive if we do it and they don’t’.
Superficial and flawed arguments yes but still thrown around as an excuse for prevarication. Let’s be clear, it is not an act of self-harm to reduce our flying or cut down on red meat or invest in green energy. The human race survived for millennia without having a stag do in Vilnius or a winter break in the Seychelles, Until twenty years ago only a handful of people had set foot on Antarctica, now that number is tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Why? Another tick off the bucket list? Since when did we think it was a good idea to allow businesses and their influencers, and we should include many travel journalists in this category, to define what you need to do to be happy; well for a long time its true. But for much longer philosophers and thinkers have been explaining that it is a false pursuit and lasting happiness comes from a state of mind not the acquisition of material goods and 'experiences'.
Having neatly returned my diatribe back full circle in the marketing world I am supposed to conclude with a 'call to action'; a web link or discount offer to hook our next much needed customer. But then if you ae reading this you have already subscribed to our blogs so you have recently been inundated by promises of a wonderful Christmas feast and the like. So I will leave it there and wish you all a belated Happy Christmas and a wonderfully adventurous and most importantly happy, new year.
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